From Streetcars To Spaceships

EVERY kid should have a dictionary.

I think that by now anybody with a clue agrees that we need to get a lot more serious about k-12 education. And here in Oregon it's pretty damn obvious that we're even worse off than most due to the pathetic level of education funding. The schools haven't got enough money to allow the typical "solutions" and they won't any time soon.

Well, that means that we, as citizens, need to find and implement cheaper ways. Ways that don't require any significant involvement or commitments by schools or teachers. Ways that help kids across class, economic, and talent spectra.

So let's start with basics. Sometimes a good place to start is with something that is both useful and that shows the way to doing things that are more difficult or contentious. Something non-controversial so it will be allowed through the schoolhouse gates and will have minimal opposition from parents and other potential roadblocks.

So let's get started on getting a usable, well-designed, kid-optimized dictionary into the hands of every schoolchild in the state of Oregon.

Speaking as a publisher, I know how much it costs to produce, print, and ship books and I'm telling you that for an order of several thousand or more, we could get dictionaries for under a buck apiece. And I'm betting that done right it should be possible to get printers, paper suppliers, and others to kick in enough to get that down to fifty cents a copy.

But let's start with a budget of a dollar-fifty per copy.

And let's start by choosing one year.

I say choose eight grade. It's right around then that kids start to feel most abandoned and it's about then that they are expected to do a lot more for themselves. They're mature enough to handle "adult formatted" type and have vocabularies large enough to justify something a bit more complex than most of them will have access to.

And beyond that, they're reaching the age that it gets essential that they have beautiful things of their own that are sophisticated enough to help develop the sense of nuance that is so essential to good adult judgement. I love ebooks. I'm very in favor of online content. But for certain things, it's still better to have an actual physical copy. And this is one of those things.

Now, my plate is beyond full, so I don't know when or how I'm going to pull this off. It helps that I'll be dealing with plenty of the relevant people anyway in the course of doing my own work. But piece by piece I intend to proof out text, including some Oregon-specific stuff, put together layouts, and do a small print run, possibly, if I have to, on my own nickel. Then I'm going to give them away to the students of any school I can find that will say "yes".

Except for a couple hundred copies that I will keep around as examples. To show to possible donors. Because I want to see a non-profit up and running, one utterly independent of the government, with a charter and an endowment, whose purpose is to work towards having every student in every school in Oregon, from third grade on, walk into school the first week of the year and get asked if they have a dictionary. And if they say "no", one gets handed to them. No other rules, no other conditions. And twenty percent held in reserve each year to be handed out to the kids who lose theirs during the year.

Of course, I have no objection to copies of this being made available for sale in stores. At, say, six bucks a copy. With half of the profits going straight to the endowment. I'm a big believer in the power of a well-configured endowment and nothing in the recent economic news changes that conviction a bit.

You think that I'm nuts? Work it out. I don't have the time to do the links right now, but go for it, look at how many kids are in school in Oregon in a given year. This is a doable thing. And if it is done right, it lays the groundwork for more ambitious plans. For taking a bit more of the load off of schools and parents. For taking advantage of the wonders of modern manufacturing, design, and pedagogical understanding in ways that schools and governments can't and/or won't.

I don't know about you, but I'm eager to get started.

The Portland Zine Symposium and related news

Just in case any of you in the Portland area don't know yet, the Portland Zine Symposium is coming up in two weeks at PSU. If it's anything like last year, it'll be a blast. Hundreds of small publishers, distributors, and makers of cool print-related things of all sorts, from fanzines to hand-painted poetry books to vast posters of sea monsters. Not to mention lectures, teach-ins, at least a couple of bands, and other related shenanigans. I'll have a full table, hopefully, so I expect to have even more fun than I did last year, when, due to a paperwork snafu, I had to share a table and was kinda scrunched. My mother may even come up from Eugene to help staff the table.

Today was the Anarchist Book Fair at Red & Black Cafe, and while I may not have sold a lot of product, I and pretty much everybody else looked to be having a whole bunch of fun. I haven't seen such a happy crowd of interesting people in a very long time. And I can't think of any time I've ever seen a crowd where so many people seemed to be willing to talk to and substantively interact with people they had never met before. Since I live six whole blocks from Red & Black I didn't exactly have to put myself out to table there. It probably says a lot that even though the book fair officially ended at 6:00, the last of us didn't pack up and shut down our tables until after 9:00 at night.

And let me just take this chance to say that both the folks at Red & Black and the folks from the Black Rose Collective were an absolute pleasure to deal with. Ari in particular was a dynamo. She looked to be in motion the whole day.

I just love Portland on days like this.

And, on a related note, as soon as I deliver their stock, you'll now be able to get my whole line of posters, not to mention my "replace the system" stickers at The Dollar Scholar on Hawthorne. Obviously I'm not exactly getting rich from this. In fact, on some products I'll be losing money just based on printing costs. But I figure that it's worth it. They're cool folks and I'll be able to get more of my beloved posters in front of new readers.

Anyway, I hope to see some of y'all at the Zine Symposium. It looks to be grand ol' time.

What do you do when your satire is being overtaken by reality?

Back in 1999 I left my last corporate job (acting IT director of This Old House Magazine) in a wave of mutual frustration and discord. Fwiw, I had gotten in a vicious feud with the powers that be because I was insisting that the AOL-Time/Warner merger was going to be a disaster and I was refusing to merge our email system with the AOL one, I had been called lazy and/or incompetent by a Time, Inc. V.P. because I hadn't been able to get him and his staff the kinds of subnotebooks I had agreed were an excellent idea, and I had spent about a hundred thousand dollars getting current equipment like real workgroup printers for the departments (such as marketing!) that hadn't been upgraded in five years while telling the art director that it would take a while to get her the kind of dual screen, massively souped up, massively untested Mac she was demanding.

And then they held up my last three thousand dollars worth of paycheck for about two months.

And told me that my health insurance was expiring a month before I had been told it would.

I was pissed. And I decided for the first and last time in my adult life to try to write fiction. Now, I write the worst dialogue of anybody in the known world. And my characterization makes the WWF seem nuanced and subtle. So fiction isn't usually my thing. But in the mood I was in, writing a Swiftian, bitter, "modest proposal" kinda story seemed like just the sort of tonic I needed. First I dashed off a few even worse short stories that the world has been saved from and my mood while writing those was so foul that my apartmentmate was afraid to be in the room with me when I was at the computer. Then I sat down and wrote out a "vast exaggeration" of the world going very wrong. The kind of thing that would happen if our society just flat out lost all common sense. I put lots of work into putting in all sorts of telling details. The freaky ruling at the center of it came from the Ninth Circuit because they have a reputation for that kind of thing. The mechanism for the virus was based on recent DNA findings. My crazy right wingers were based on recent statements by anti-abortion preachers.

And when I was done I felt much better. And I thought that what I had written was pretty doggone funny. In a sick, end of the world, kind of way, of course.

Well, my friend Sara says that I telegraph like Western Union so I'm sure you know what I'm about to say next. By today, about seventy percent of what was in that story has come true. And I just saw an article on Reuters that puts another piece in place, in just about the way my story had predicted.

And since my story ended with the reestablishment of widespread slavery throughout the western world, I'm just not feeling any too secure right about now. And I don't find my story funny these days; not at all.

Folks, we'd better make damned sure that Obama wins and successfully takes office. Because if we don't we're really and truly going to see Western civilization fall. It's just that simple.